Searching for Supernova Remnants on Superior’s Shore or How We Celebrated our 25th Anniversary.

by Kurt HilligPrinted in Reflections: February, 2007.

There are ideas the human mind cannot wrap itself around, however hard
it tries; there are things too big and things too
small, things too old and things too new, things too simple and things
too mysterious. But we are human, and still we
try....

Ten billion years ago: The sky (before there was a sky!) was filled with
lights unimaginable, celestial fireworks on a
scale beyond comprehension; cinders strewn on vast yet ephemeral winds,
whence came all that we now see and feel and
taste and touch.

One billion years ago: A world covered with smoke and shadow, molten rock
flowing through torn crust spreads like
molten fudge poured onto a marble table before the confectioner starts
to work it. Rain falls on hot rock: dissolution,
percolation, precipitation, crystallization.

One hundred million years ago: The slowest of collisions raises mountain
chains, bends rock, warps continents, reshapes
the Earth. Water continues to refine, to reform.

Ten thousand years ago: Retreating ice has dropped the fragments that advancing
ice had carried. Advancing men find
fragments of a strange material: heavy and cold, malleable and lustrous,
easy to shape and hard to break, colored sometimes
like the moss or the grass or the trees, sometimes like the sunset, sometimes
like blood.

One hundred years ago: Men have delved deep by the light of candles using
the power of sweat and sinew, fire and water
and steam. Men have built great engines and opened vast caverns. Men have
strained and suffered, and many have died,
but the prize some have won is star-stuff.

One hundred days ago: Two specks, on a speck, orbiting a speck, lost amid
a hundred billion other specks, set out on a
journey to find shards and fragments of the primordial cataclysm.

Imagine a sheet of paper ten feet wide and forty feet long; color it red
so you can find it again, then lay it flat on top of a
stack of paper a foot high. Pile another two or three inches of paper on
top of this, then push in the edges of the pile (a
half-dozen Caterpillar D7 bulldozers would do nicely) so it curls up at
the sides, forming a long trough. Fill with water,
then stretch to a hundred miles wide, bend it into a shallow U and call
it Lake Superior. The near edge runs from Ironwood
through the Keewenaw to Copper Harbor before dropping under water and turning
to the south; the far edge is
mostly submerged save for Isle Royale. And that one thin sheet is now twenty
feet thick and dives down into the ground
at a fifty degree angle....

For years beyond record people have gathered copper from the rocks by the
shores of gichi-gami; and we have joined the
throng. The search is slower now, the prizes smaller, the rewards now found
in the beauty of miniature prisms and needles,
of metallic feathers and threads, rich colors and sparkling crystals; epidote
and microcline, calcite and quartz,
prehnite and datolite and chrysocolla. And, occasionally, nuggets: hard
and heavy and malleable, colored like the moss or
the grass or the trees, or sometimes glowing like the sunset. And we wonder
how and why....